knew how the single-heartedness of that had absolved her in their eyes; but for what it had plunged her in they would have had less comprehension. For it was not in a nature so essentially womanly as Judith's to be content with sex-starvation once passion had been aroused in her, and the irony of it all was that she, who had not for several years awoken to stirred senses with the man she loved, was unable to stifle their urgency after she had left him. From slight dalliance with first one man and then another, she had progressed to the greater intimacies, ashamed but unfighting. Till at last the pricking thing had begun to grow fainter and her will stronger and she was able to break away. She hid the truth and kept up the old tradition of having loved only once, partly because it was true she had not felt actual love again, but partly for vanity's sake.... It was not that she was vain of the romantic figure she seemed to her friends; it was a more deadly thing than that. She was vain of the quality of her past love. Too much had been made of it, and she would have been more than human had she succeeded altogether in escaping the temptation to visualise herself as the tragic survivor of a great passion. And to this had she come, although her love had been so real.... Ishmael never again during that visit felt quite the easy intimacy with Judy that he had touched that day by the stream, though as the next few years went on and her visits became a regular thing to look forward to there was built up between them a fabric of friendship that grew to be something unique to both. Those things which had happened to Judy had taught her every tolerance and sympathy. They were not on the whole bad, those years that followed. Nicky, after writing more or less regularly, suddenly announced his intention of coming home again, and Ishmael was filled with a joy that no personal thing had had power to wake in him since the boy had gone. The thought of Nicky had seldom been far from him; always it was with the idea of Nicky in the forefront of his mind that he worked for Cloom. When he had first taken on the idea of Cloom as the central scheme of his life it had been for Cloom itself, or rather for the building up of an ideal Cloom which his father's conduct had shattered. Now he realised that if he had had no son to inherit after him his work would not have held the same deep significance for him, even though it was not with any conscious idea of a son that he had started on his task. Now, since Nicky's departure, he had begun to see how incomplete the whole scheme would have been without him, how incomplete it would still be if Nicky wanted to wander all his days, or if modernity and the new country over the sea should have come to mean more to him than the old. He knew by Nicky's letter that this was not so, and his heart sang within him. For days after the letter came a glamour that to his eyes the world had lost illuminated it once again.